Historically, commercial or retail establishments have used ice that is derived from an ice bagging machine, pre-bagged ice, ice machine or ice vending machine. Often pre-bagged ice, whether made offsite from an ice bagging machine and shipped to a retail site or bagged onsite and stored in bagged form, is frozen hard and it is days and weeks old before a customer can obtain them through a dispenser box. Such pre-bagged hard ice is stale and can undesirably take on odors during storage or transport. Also, prebagged ice often agglomerates into chunks of ice that are too large for the customer to readily use e.g. they will no longer fit into a cup or pitcher, which forces the customer to take additional efforts to reduce the ice agglomerate size before use.
To accommodate the customer's needs, ice is provided for consumption via an ice machine. Typically, the ice machine is a large dispensing box where there is a bin full of ice and a scoop for retrieving the ice. A customer reaches inside this bin with the scoop and retrieves ice to deposit into an ice bucket or ice chest. This open-air type of ice dispensing exposes the ice to a variety of potentially unfavorable and even unhealthy conditions. These unhealthy conditions stem from contact with the customer's hands, the bucket or chest and water borne bacteria.
Ice vending machines only address part of the issues of unhealthy conditions surrounding the dispensing of ice. Generally, ice vending machines are in hotels, motels and the like. They dispense ice vertically into small open containers. This method of dispensing ice addresses the issue of human hands coming in contact with the ice but says little about possible contamination of the small container.
Thus, it is desirable to provide an apparatus whereby a customer can receive fresh-bagged ice conveniently, at any time of day or night. It is also desired, that the source of ice be made onsite to avoid the cost, expense and time lag of transporting pre-bagged ice to a retail site where customers may purchase it.